Comment Posted To Gyre & Gimble

The concept of representation in general is one of the things that Charles Sanders Peirce developed his theory of 3-adic sign relations to cover, borrowing the name “semiotics” (in various spellings) from Locke and reconstituting a number of earlier traditions within the framework of mathematical relation theory.

Our usual notions of representation in mathematics are a special case of what he had in mind, since they refer to functions and functions are 2-adic relations. They fall very roughly into the category of “analogical” or “iconic” representations.

I’m not really sure these comments are getting through, so I’ll break off here and try to post a few links later.